Chapter 400: Infiltrating Mordor
No matter how his dark power searched, it found no way in. The Ring of Earth turned it aside from every direction, leaving no crack, no seam, not the faintest gap to exploit.
"How… can this be?" Sauron's voice rose, his burning red eyes narrowing in disbelief.
By all logic, any ring forged using the craft he had taught should carry a hidden door, a weakness built into the very bones of its making, something he could find and turn against its wearer. That was how it had always worked. That was the surety he had built into every ring ever made with his knowledge.
This one had nothing.
It was as though Cemya existed outside the entire lineage of the Rings of Power, rooted in his craft but grown so far beyond it that his reach could no longer find it.
Even if he reclaimed the One Ring this moment, he knew with cold certainty that it would not let him control this ring. It was beyond him.
Kael watched the disbelief move across Sauron's face and let out a quiet, contemptuous sound.
He had not forged Cemya carelessly. From the beginning, he had thought about this exact problem, and he had made sure there was no hidden door left for anyone to use against him. The ring was built on the foundation of Sauron's ring-craft, yes, but Kael had also woven into it the techniques of alchemy and goblin smithing, and he had done something no living craftsman could have managed alone: he had used the Resurrection Stone to call back the spirits of two masters.
The first was Celebrimbor, the greatest Elven smith of the Second Age, who had forged the Three Elven Rings with his own hands. The second was Fëanor himself, the most gifted craftsman in all the history of Arda: the High King of the Noldor, the creator of the Tengwar script, the maker of the Silmarils and the Palantíri and the Lamps of Fëanor, the one being in all of Ilúvatar's children most praised for the fire of his craft.
Under the guidance and direct assistance of those two legendary masters, working across decades of painstaking effort, Kael had forged Cemya. It had grown from Sauron's ring-craft as its starting point, but it had gone somewhere Sauron could not follow, somewhere his influence could not touch.
However much Sauron refused to accept it, he could feel that it was true. This ring was beyond his reach.
He had always been supremely confident in his own craft. That confidence was part of why he had been so certain the One Ring could be used to dominate any other ring ever forged. But now a ring had appeared that stood outside that system entirely, and it unsettled him in a way he had not felt in a very long time.
Sauron's gaze, once cold and calculating, sharpened into a lethal, singular focus on Kael. A new weight entered his stare—not the look of a conqueror, but of a predator who had found a flaw in his prey.
This anomaly could not stand. He would unmake the upstart, cast his defiance into the void, and wrest the ring from Kael's hand, tearing its secrets apart to understand the craft that dared to defy him.
With that thought settled, Sauron turned the full weight of his power against Cemya's dome. He intended to shatter it.
His attack was terrifying. Dark power surged against the golden light like the ocean battering a small island, wave after enormous wave, trying to grind it down, to overwhelm it, to crush it into nothing.
The golden dome held.
It was sunk into the earth and drawing from it without pause, steady as bedrock, and Kael stood at its heart with Cemya blazing on his finger, channelling the earth's strength upward into the shield in a continuous, unbroken flow. The ground was his foundation and his fortress. It absorbed and dispersed the force of Sauron's blows in ways no magic alone could have managed.
The earth shook continuously under the assault. Fissures split the ground wide open, dropping into black depths with no visible bottom. Boulders tumbled. Rivers were thrown from their courses. The landscape around them was being destroyed blow by blow.
But beneath the dome, nothing was touched.
At the same time, Gandalf, Galadriel, and Elrond had finally succeeded. The ancient craft within their rings, once wide and vulnerable to Sauron's malice, was now bound and sealed by their own combined light. For now, the Three were silent, and Sauron was blind to them.
With that burden lifted, all three of them were free again.
Even without the Three Rings behind them, they were among the most powerful beings in Middle-earth.
Gandalf chanted steadily as he drove the butt of his staff into the shaking ground. A vast crack split the earth beneath the dark army, yawning open in an instant, and hundreds of Orcs, Trolls, and Barrow-wights plunged screaming into the abyss. Then the continuing tremors brought the edges grinding back together, and the crack sealed closed.
Elrond drew his Elven blade and burst into the air with the full, explosive force of a veteran warrior, sweeping down toward Sauron from above with a strike that carried everything he had.
Glorfindel shone beside him, blazing with his own radiance, twin blades moving in perfect coordination with Elrond as he pressed in from the other side.
And then Galadriel drew a longsword from the dimensional pouch at her side.
Something in her bearing changed utterly the moment the blade came free. The gracious, luminous lady of Lothlórien was still there in the lines of her face, but the force behind her eyes had sharpened into something ferocious and absolute. She moved like a warrior who had spent more ages in battle than most beings had lived, and she drove herself into the close-quarters assault on Sauron without a heartbeat's hesitation.
Kael blinked, staring at her for just a moment, and could not entirely suppress his surprise. He had always known Galadriel was powerful. He had not quite pictured her as this. He made a silent note never to judge anyone's nature by how they chose to present it.
Then he shook it off and threw himself into the fight alongside the others, pressing Sauron from every angle while letting Cemya's protective light hold around all of them.
Far away, as the great battle raged across the plains of Eriador, the signal reached Lothlórien.
Frodo had been waiting for it. With Sauron gone from Mordor, drawn west to Eriador, the path ahead was as clear as it was ever going to be. He said his farewell to Lord Celeborn without delay, and he and Sam activated their Portkey together.
It brought them to the eastern border of Gondor, to the pass of Cirith Ungol in the Ephel Dúath, at the edge of Mordor's shadow.
Mordor was close now. Through Cirith Ungol lay the road to the heart of it, and at the end of that road, Mount Doom.
Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli arrived a moment later by their own Portkey and joined them in the shadow of the rocks.
Sauron had emptied Mordor to make his assault, but he had not emptied it completely. Cirith Ungol was still held by a heavy Orc guard, and the fortress of Minas Morgul, though Kael had burned much of it some time ago, still had forces within it. The sky above was thick with crows and enormous bats moving in patrol patterns. Beyond them lurked vampires, werewolves, Dark sorcerers, Uruk-hai, Trolls, great spiders, and other black creatures whose names were seldom spoken.
High on Barad-dûr, the Eye of Sauron burned in its tower, a flaming presence that was in some sense a part of Sauron himself, sweeping its gaze across every corner of Mordor without rest. Anything unusual, and Sauron's full awareness would snap to it in an instant.
So even with the Dark Lord and the bulk of his army drawn away, Mordor was still a death trap, and the price of a single mistake would be absolute.
The five of them, Aragorn, Frodo, Sam, Legolas, and Gimli, pressed themselves behind a large boulder. They waited until a flock of crows had swept past overhead, then peered carefully around the edge toward the checkpoint in the distance.
The number of Orcs at the pass was enough to make their hearts sink.
"What do we do?" Frodo asked quietly, the strain showing in his face. "There are too many of them. We can't just walk through."
"Why not?" Gimli tightened his grip on his axe, battle-ready and entirely unbothered. "We kill our way through. Simple enough."
Legolas had already unshouldered his bow, his voice low and controlled. "I can slip ahead and deal with them quietly. If I move fast enough, I can clear a path before any alarm is raised."
Aragorn stopped them both with a small, firm shake of his head. "We need to get into Mordor without being noticed," he said, keeping his voice to barely above a murmur. "If we make too much noise, if they realise what we're trying to do, it's over. All of it."
Gimli frowned. "So we have to get through without making a sound and without killing anyone? How is that supposed to work?"
Aragorn went quiet for a moment, thinking. Then something crossed his face. He reached into his dimensional pouch and drew out a small bottle.
"What's that?" Sam asked, eyeing it with curiosity.
"Polyjuice Potion," Aragorn said. "Lord Kael gave it to me before we left. He said we might need it." He looked around at the others. "We drink it, take on the appearance of Orcs, and walk straight in with the rest of them."
The idea landed, and something lit up in every face around the boulder.
That was the moment Legolas went still.
His expression changed. He spun silently and had an arrow nocked and drawn before anyone else had moved a muscle.
"Who's there?"